If you want to optimize your company’s internal processes, it is important to use modern methodologies that are designed specifically for this purpose. For example, devops services will help you to solve many different issues and create exactly the business model that will be most effective in your situation. Let us study more carefully how exactly you can apply devops methodology for small business.

Advantages of devops for small business

• Automate and make it as easy as possible to deploy new versions and bug fixes. Container applications using Docker and deploy containers with new versions of code in the cloud using Docker Swarm or Kubernetes is ideal for this purpose. The team will be able to focus on writing the code, and the machines will take care of all the work to deliver the code to the end user.
• Basically, monitor the project. In this case you should monitor the overall performance of your product and the basic usage metrics – the number of user registrations, their main actions in the system, the number of records in the database, the load on servers and the average system response time. It makes sense to pay special attention to failure monitoring (for example, using Sentry). Monitoring allows you to find out for yourself about problematic situations before users learn about the failure.
• Make backups. Small teams (especially in the early stages of development) often score on this point. Don’t score – it’s better to automate it once than to find out for once what it means to restore all data from scratch. Especially since there are now a huge number of backup systems for any purpose – from primitive self-written scripts and simple solutions for a single server to ready-made cloud solutions and huge enterprise level systems.

• Manage server configurations and simplify the commissioning of new machines. You can limit yourself to a very basic approach – write instructions on how to set up and configure services in a repository. If you have the time and desire, you can automate some of the configuration operations with the utilities Salt or Ansible. Or, in general, you can configure all services once manually, then create an image of the operating system with all programs and settings and then copy the entire infrastructure to new machines from the image, without touching configuration files at all.
• Make basic tests for complex, difficult to test places. For example, for custom scripts that involve hundreds of data fields. Or for operations that consist of a thousand small steps, each of which must be guaranteed to work. For example, for complex calculations, labor-intensive algorithms and places where monotonous manual labor is required (say, testing algorithms of machine learning, when the test input is fed 1,000 images that require computer vision recognition). In case of launching new features or large-scale refactoring, even a simple set of tests will save you a lot of problems and dozens of man-hours.

And how will the application behave when running on a thousand servers? It’s easy to check, we create scripts of 1,000 cloud servers, roll out the software under test and collect the results! Is it possible to raise a new cluster from scratch to test the server part of a new mobile application? Elementary, with the help of a test scenario, we raise a new version of the backend for a couple of days and analyze the system behavior, isolating the experimental version from the main one. A test experiment of almost any complexity and scale takes up to several minutes if you integrate the tests with the cloud infrastructure.